Breaking India: an open letter to George Hart

Breaking India is a recent book by the well-known intellectuals Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan. It explores western interventions in Indian society under various guises. Such interventions serve the near-sighted interests of a few vested interest groups such as the Christian right in the USA but weaken India in the long-term. A weakened India not only means the loss of a strategic partner in R&D and economic journey forward for the USA but also a dominant China and Pakistan, a scenario that does not augur well for America’s future.

One of the angles the book explores, with ample evidence, is how a section of American academics actually collaborates with hate-groups, and corrupt and divisive forces in such interventions. One such academic who is discussed in the book is Professor George Hart, who held the Berkeley Tamil Chair. Hart’s association with hate-groups which the book exposes should alarm everyone. This open letter to George Hart is based on irrefutable facts presented in the book.

Professor George Hart,

I hope you have read Breaking India and that you have the integrity to respond to this open letter. Breaking India reveals that:

1. You have disseminated the Dravidian propaganda exemplifying the "cunning Brahmin responsible for all social evils." You are aware of the fact that Brahmins constitute less than two percent of Tamil population. They have been the target of intense hate campaign by Dravidian parties for several decades. History is aware that whenever an ethnic minority group is subject to such hate sometimes it results in genocides as the cases of the Holocaust and Rwanda testify. What motivated you to repeat this canard against a defenseless minority? How were you rewarded in return?

2. The pro-LTTE outfit FetNA was a major fundraiser for the Berkeley Tamil Chair. LTTE has been a proscribed terrorist organization which assassinated a former Indian prime minister, forcibly recruited Tamil children to fight in the battlefield, and laid waste to the Tamil civilization of Sri Lanka. Do you not have any moral scruples about getting monetary support from the front outfit of a terrorist group that destroys the lives of innocent children?

Here are a few points the book does not discuss. But they are related.

3. You attended the World Tamil Congress hosted by Karunanidhi, the disgraced and corrupt former chief minister of Tamilnadu, in 2010. Karunanidhi has espoused intense hatred for the minority Brahmins and Malayalees, characterized them as unwelcome immigrants, who have no right to equal status in Tamil society. Karunanidhi’s views are an echo of the similar anti-immigrant and racist views held by some white supremacist groups in the USA. Why did you attend an event hosted by such a demagogue unless you tacitly support his stance? If you support his stance, should I, as an immigrant to the USA, fear you? Please do not offer the lame excuse that you ignored Karunanidhi’s antecedents and attended the Congress because of your love of the Tamil language because I will then ask you if you would attend a Tamil congress hosted by a Hindutva organization. Bluntly put, if you have no ideological affinity towards Karunanidhi, what did he offer to have you as part of his entourage?

4. India is a developing nation. A third of Indian population is languishing in poverty. These people were further impoverished when Karunanidhi lavishly spent tax money on the World Tamil Congress, where theses eulogizing Karunanidhi and his now incarcerated criminal daughter Kanimozhi were presented. Were you flown from the USA to Coimbatore and hosted in an expensive hotel using tax money? Does it ever bother you that some poor Tamil girl child might have been denied her leukemia therapy to pay for your rendezvous with Karunanidhi?

Professor George Hart, I hope you will not respond to this letter with ad hominem attack. Please do not list the translations of Tamil texts the Berkeley Tamil Chair has published as your response because that is not relevant to the specific arguments made in this open letter. I hope you will not succumb to the temptation to brand me a Hindutva activist (which I am not but I also do not think anyone should be ashamed of being a Hindutva any more than one should be ashamed of calling oneself a Christian, Muslim, Tamil, American, capitalist, socialist, Gandhian, or democrat) and emotionally appealing to other white academics and their brown sipahis for support as such bonding behavior would not be the answer to this open letter. I hope you will have the decency of replying honestly to each argument in this letter and to perform a prayaschitta if you really think you erred.